Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet, OpenAI Hacked, One Year Of Threads

0:00The internet is evolving and the seemingly inexplicable meme at the center actually explains a lot. OpenAI was hacked. Will it be worse next time? Funding pours into AI startups and threads turns one. All that and more is coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, a show where we break down the week's news in our typical cool-headed and nuanced fashion. We have a lot of news to break down on this July 4th weekend. I'm joined as always by Ronjan Roy. We're going to talk about the involving internet. We're going to talk about this hack that OpenAI experienced.

0:37And then, of course, looking at the year of threads and what it means next to Twitter. So first, let me bring in Ranjan. Ranjan, welcome. It's good to see you, Alex. I'm currently in Taipei, Taiwan, still at an Airbnb that is a converted massage parlor, of all things. When we walked in, my wife, our family, and our cousins, you can see it's four rooms all kind of going all down one hall and it's very clear what it was. It's been totally refurbished and it's very nice, but it's, uh, it's been an interesting week for me. I think that's like a perfect lead into like what we're going to talk about.

1:11I think it is too. I'll be honest for the life of me. I couldn't understand why there was this one meme, uh, that was going as viral as it was for as long as it was and just wouldn't die. And it was something I really wanted to ignore because I didn't want to talk about it on the podcast. Uh, But I think we have to now because it really is a signal of how the internet has shifted. So for those who... What is that meme, Alex? Well, I first want to know that this is a parental guidance moment. This is definitely going to be a wacky July 4th show. So I'm just letting you guys all know and gals know at the start that this could go off the rails.

1:47So if you have kids in the car, maybe switch the channel and then you can sort of pick this up when you're on your own time. But basically, there is a meme. It's called The Hawk Tua Girl. And I'm just going to read because I don't really want to try to explain it on my own because it sort of makes still makes me a little bit uncomfortable. But I'm going to read from Max Reed, his story called Hawk Tua and the Internet. He goes, Hawk Tua, if you're not yet familiar, is a newly popular meme derived from a street interview video in which a woman in Nashville named Haley Welch responds to the question.

2:23What move in bed makes a man go crazy every time? and she says I don't want to even read it she says you gotta give him I think everyone's seen it everyone's seen it okay and so I was like for the life of me I couldn't understand why this meme was so prominent and why it just kept spawning meme after meme and wouldn't go away it seemed like a throwaway moment in an on the street interview not a big cultural moment to me at all. And now some of the folks who are writing about the internet have kind of explained it, and it makes a lot of sense in context. This is again from Max Reed. The broad success as a meme is less about its own intrinsic qualities than about the increasing size and cultural power of something I'm going to call the zinternet.

3:18Over the last 10 years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, provocative 20 and sometimes embarrassingly 30-somethings, mostly but by no means entirely male, have emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. And maybe you could even call it like the culture. This network is adjacent to the sports internet, the hustle internet, and the reactionary internet of traditional influencers. but in its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural references. And here we go, college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, and then Zin nicotine pouches with influential personalities and media outlets, among them David Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and Hey Fellow Kids content creators who nearly all work for sports betting concerns.

4:14So basically the argument here is that this is not a meme in a vacuum, but really sort of like the epitome of an internet culture that's moving from whatever it was beforehand to one that's far more fratty, far more dirty, far more obsessed with gambling and betting. And very different, I would say, from the early social internet that was really defined by nerds. And the nerds wanted news because they wanted influence and nerds wanted celebrities because they wanted to feel important. And that's why we ended up having effectively journalists and news outlets pour into Twitter and Facebook. And they would celebrate any moment when, let's say, a Justin Bieber would tweet.

4:53I feel like in Twitter offices there must have been an alarm that went off when Justin Bieber tweeted. But we're definitely living in a different Internet now where sports betting has been legalized. It's financing a lot of content. Online gambling is financing a lot of content. And then, of course, Elon Musk owns Twitter. And that's what we get. We've sort of shifted from this nerd internet to the bro internet, and that's what this internet is. I'm curious what you think about the shift, whether this is something that's being overemphasized by the bloggers and whether Hawk Tua really sort of showed a shift here.

5:26This is my favorite piece of cultural internet writing, I think, of the year. And the term zinternet will stick, I'm calling it. I think even Max Reed himself recognized, as he said, that he has to write this piece because once you come up with the term Zinternet, you can't just let that one go. My only slight issue with the piece is he talks about a boorishly provocative 20 and sometimes embarrassingly 30-somethings. I will recognize being in my early 40s, some of the bro chats still lean in this direction. I got a happy Zin Dependence Day text a few hours ago right before starting to plan for this podcast.

6:04So I think it might stretch even further. But the most fascinating part about this piece, I thought, was how it tied together those different trends. So first of all, Zin pouches, which is one of those weird subcultures that as I get older, I had realized had become massive. And I just did not even understand what was going on or what was happening. And then even especially 20-somethings at my work, talking to them. Wait, explain what a Zin's are. It's a tobacco pouch that delivers. Actually, I'm not even 100 % sure, but I think it's the, like a Zin is to chewing tobacco what a vape is to a cigarette.

6:43It's like a more clean nicotine delivery, but via pouch in your lip like you would have chewed tobacco in the past. Right, owned by Philip Morris. and so, I would say, so powerful that I was walking around Manhattan with a health tech CEO recently, and he offered me a Zin and was just like, you got to try this stuff. I'm like, you know, that's bad for you, right? But he's like, these things, they really hit. They, I mean, they really hit, I guess. That's why I think, but so that's already been there. Then you have the rise of sports gambling. I think that's the most interesting connection here because that's the financing of all of this is that if you are trying to launch some kind of clothing line, you're trying to monetize somehow like an influencer without monetization is nothing.

7:35And now suddenly there's been this massive influx of money going after the people who can reach these internet audience and being able to give them money. And Dave Portnoy kind of is the original example of this. Because remember, he sold Barstool Sports to Penn Gaming right before gambling was legalized for, I think,$500 million,$550 million. And then they essentially wrote it off and sold it back to him for nothing. Like, it just did not work. But he was the original sign that you can take your audience of – take this audience and monetize them massively from gambling. And then the third one, Elon Musk, Twitter.

8:14Now the algorithm is certainly tweaked. The culture is moving in the direction as well that like these kind of things are becoming more mainstream. So I think realizing how all three of those factors come together to perfectly crystallize in the form of Hak Tua, I think it's a pretty clear, impressive thing that he wrote. The one thing I would say it's missing is that there's also an element of backlash to the original social Internet. Right. Whereas like the original social Internet was, shall we say, very democratic, prude to a certain extent. It was I don't know, it became to be less fun. I don't think it really catered to the common person as much as this Internet does right now.

9:01I would disagree with safe and prude, because if you're ever on Tumblr in 2011, 12, it was not a safe prude place. But I actually agree with you that niche, everything was niche. Everything like signaling, everything was about finding some niche thing that no one else has seen. And within your community that's online of people, the like 100 other people that think like you being able to find them, I think that was the promise of that early Web 2.0. And then now you're right. It's mass market meme. What is something that is appealing to just a massive swath of the population? And that's this internet.

9:42And maybe we can dig in a little bit more because it's starting to crystallize to me that this internet or whatever you want to call it, the barstool internet, whatever it might be, has also risen alongside the ascent of the For You page. Right? You talk about this mass market versus niche. A niche would be great. Like if you're a small account on Twitter, but you had a niche following, you could still speak with them every day. But now you're not getting any play at all on the For You page. You're totally being outshadowed by, you know, this sort of internet content, which is going to be more engaging.

10:16Remember, like Haktooh sort of like threads the needle there where it's like it's sexual. It is entertaining. And it's like, yes, of course. in like an era of the For You page. It's almost the For You and the recommendation algorithm has ushered this in just as much as the rise of gambling and Elon Musk buying Twitter. I think we're going to have to race to see who writes this post first because I think that's perfect. I think like, okay, so there's a For You page on Twitter, but then also the rise of reels and Instagram completely shifting from a follower-based social network and a chronological timeline to also algorithmic short form video.

10:58So even if you weren't on TikTok already, now you're on reels, and it's being algorithmically served to you. And I can admit, again, my Instagram feed, there's a lot of internet content. There's a, I mean, and then you even see how the advertisers, it's like bird dogs, pants, if you're familiar, Vori definitely goes after these internet, like how the whole thing comes together. And that's just from probably watching one video following dave portnoy and then just from those signals the reels algorithm just completely inundates you with this kind of content so i think i think that's right algorithmic based content feeds now and who has embodied the transformation from what's called the nerd internet to this internet more than mark zuckerberg himself because today it was impossible if you logged on to the internet we're talking on thursday right july 4th it was impossible if you logged on to the internet to miss the video of mark zuckerberg wake surfing in a tuxedo holding an american flag no no this no this isn't i don't think this is hydrofoiling i think this is wake surfing uh isn't that his big thing hydrofoil no i think he switched because he's in a wake and you don't i don't think you hydrofoil on a wake um but anyway either wake surfing or hydrofoiling basically doing a board sport in a tuxedo in the water with an american flag in one hand and a tall boy it looks like a beer i don't know maybe it's like a coors banquet a coors banquet tall boy i had to look into this i had to do the research and it's like you couldn't you really could not um sort of explain the shift to this new internet better than looking at Mark Zuckerberg posting pictures of himself in fields in Oklahoma with sheep in 2016 to what he's doing today, which is surfing, it looks like in Hawaii, with the American flag of the tux and the long hair.

13:00And that is sort of where we are. And he's the content king. It's as broad as signal as possible that this is where the internet's moving. How do you think those posts come to be? I've always been fascinated. And I think when we've talked about Mark Zuckerberg's overall kind of PR transformation from nerdy internet guy to ultimate fighter, cool guy, handsome Zuckerberg wearing chains and everything. But like a post like this, I don't know. I always want an oral history of like, you know, was it him who brought it up? Was there a meeting? Were there a series of meetings set up? Is it actually official Facebook resources or is it, you know, just him and his friends hanging out and playing around?

13:51I don't know. I'm always so curious these kind of things, how they come to be before they are. Yeah, definitely. I'll note also professional videographer. So, yeah, this one seems professional. Also to note, I follow. So in Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram have been trying to promote this idea of broadcast channels. And I've like looked into this in the past. Basically, it's the idea that you kind of follow someone and they push content to you. So it is like a one to many broadcast feed. So obviously Mark Zuckerberg was the first person who launched this type of account within Instagram. And he pushed it to millions of people who follow him on this.

14:31And the app definitely kind of, I don't want to say tricked you, but led you into following his broadcast channel. So again, they planned this video. It's good. It's pretty awesome. And then they just push it out to everyone on Instagram. And happy July 4th. Yeah, but go back to this internet thing. So I'm pretty convinced this is a signal from Mark of where this is all heading. What do you think? Yeah, no, no. I think you can see even in his circle doing something like this they all thought would be cool and funny and fun. Like, again, wakeboarding and tall boy in hand. And it kind of is. I hate to – Yeah, it's resonating online today.

15:17It's rough. Yeah, it's resonating. His whole UFC thing I always find a bit cringeworthy. Also Zinternet adjacent, sports betting and all that stuff. If you think about it, Joe Rogan is the early Zinternet crossover from UFC to four-hour podcast talking to intellectuals. That's pretty Zinternet as well. Yeah, no, I think it's definitely here. It's grown. It's more powerful. There's so many different factors, as we've talked about, kind of making this more of a thing, I guess. And you had mentioned it briefly, but I do think the backlash to social media and the algorithms favoring, I mean, quote unquote, woke content from 2020 and 2021, where everything moved so far in one direction that there's definitely a backlash element as well here.

16:10So I think everything coming in together makes for a lot of content. And what is social media labeled this summer, by the way? Oh, so I had to put this in. Well, no, no. So this was, again, in terms of like the first place I came across the Zuck meme was Zuck won America Today, King of White Boy Summer. And for those who don't know, like White Boy Summer, I found out was a term coined by Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks's son, actually a couple of years ago that I've seen being thrown around. And again, you picture like polo shirt again, actually polo shirts and tall boys and Hamptons barbecues or whatever else.

16:54But the funny thing to me was apparently the term White Boy Summer has been co-opted by hate groups and far-right organizations. And Chet Hanks, Tom Hanks' son, actually had to write an Instagram post kind of apologizing for this saying, White Boy Summer was created to be a fun, playful, and a celebration of fly white boys who love beautiful queens of every race. Anything else that it has been twisted into to support any kind of hate or bigotry against any group of people is deplorable and I condemn it. Just the fact that like someone sat down and with a PR team and decided I have to try to reclaim white boy summer is not racist is always hilarious to me.

17:41yeah but but it sort of i mean that is that is obvious it's sort of like almost a factor of the old internet but like that this stuff will end up in the hands of hate groups but the fact that it's been broadly embraced as something that sort of is going to define summer of 2024 right like even that like finance uh six five blue eyes is also part of this right it's like that is that is sort of what we're dealing with so oh one more thing before we go before we move to the next topic. What in the world is raw dogging a flight? Well, so having been on a number of flights in the last three weeks, and this was from Tom Guerra, one of my favorite tweeters, I'd worked with him at the Financial Times.

18:20He had said also, in my opinion, this internet is reshaping norms beyond its own borders, i.e. internet culture type people doing trend pieces on raw dogging flights. And I love this because the whole – so raw dogging a flight for those unfamiliar is this trend that's kind of taken off on social media of someone, people bragging about taking a 13-hour flight and just staring at the flight map the entire time. Basically, no books, no watching, no movies, no anything. No, you don't pay for shitty internet Wi-Fi or airplane Wi-Fi and try to do work. You just sit there for 10 hours, 8 hours, 13 hours.

19:06And having been on multiple 13-hour flights and watched every bad movie that's in existence right now, I have not done this. But just the term, raw-dogging a flight, the idea of kind of like masculine reclamation of just combined with some weird health or wellness type thing of like meditate. and it's called a meditative practice is definitely a weird extension of this internet, I think. Yeah, but it sounds like the most miserable thing that you could possibly do to yourself in the world. You don't understand it, Alex. No, I don't. I'll be the first one to admit it. It is the most ridiculous thing to ever do.

19:50Don't do it. There's movies that, I mean, it's torture. Otherwise, I guess I shouldn't use the word torture, but it sucks. you know we've got to find a way to pass the time you're right though that and like now that there is this audience that's why and as tom had said in the tweet like this is why a journalist will write a trend piece on this because there is an audience receptive to this whereas in the past they would not have found that audience so they wouldn't have written the piece so i think like that's why this type of thing i i'm i'm curious what the next one's going to be but i think there's going to be a lot more of this kind of zinternet content coming out in mainstream publications because that one I saw in like I think some pretty mainstream publications.

20:33That really just sums it up perfectly. So there's another story this week that really caught my attention. I couldn't believe that how little attention it's getting maybe because the details are a little bit odd but this is from the New York Times. A hacker stole open AI secrets raising fears that China could too. it's interesting that like they go to China right away in the headline but I'll just read a little bit from the story earlier early last year a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of open AI the maker of chat GPT and stole details about the design of the company's AI technologies the hacker lifted details from discussions in an online forum where employees talked about open AI's latest tech but did not get into the systems where the company houses and builds its artificial intelligence.

21:20Okay, so the hacker got some company chatter, didn't get the weights on GPT-4. But it is a concerning issue here that OpenAI, at least their discussion forums, could get hacked. This is continuing on. OpenAI executives revealed the incidents to employees during an all-hands meeting in April 2023 and informed its board, but the executives did not share the news publicly because no information about customers or partners had been stolen. They didn't even tell the FBI or anyone else in law enforcement. And this is like the key line here for some OpenAI employees. The news raised fears that foreign adversaries such as China could steal AI technology that while now mostly a work and research tool could eventually endanger U.S.

22:11national security. And one of the employees that actually raised concerns is a recurring character here on a big technology podcast leopold oschenbrenner who we talked about a few weeks ago and who william saunders from open ai talked about um raising security concerns and then eventually uh open ai effectively i mean this is the story that saunders told reprimanded oschenbrenner and then later fired him although open ai says he wasn't fired for this but you know sort of like the worries from open ai employees has been effectively that they are they are more concerned with, let's say, I mean, their words like this, the safety team folks say, like William Saunders said, that they're more concerned with shipping shiny new products versus like advancing the safest possible research.

22:58And this is the thing that set off alarm bells. I mean, it's not quite clear what was hacked there. Like, was it their Slack that was hacked? It wasn't like their internal mainframes, but the fact that they could get hacked and they were hacked sort of brings into scope like how many entities must be trying to hack them and how concerning it can be that they are susceptible to security breaches what do you think about i think the key point there is not that you had said like that they could be hacked and that they were hacked it's that they were hacked and did not disclose this outwardly to the fbi did not like the topic of safety i think this is a really interesting story because obviously normally the topic of safety leans towards, is AI going to kill us all?

23:44But I think a more kind of like pedestrian topic of safety is just hacking. And will foreign adversaries be able to get the data that's been fed into these systems? Because it's one thing that right now, the whole conversation is, we promise you, our models will not be trained on your data if you have a certain enterprise plan. Okay. Do we trust them on that? I don't know. It's still a little iffy sometimes. But we will protect your data from all manner of hacking. It's another thing that when you are a company that that's actually not that big and mature and developed, security, I'm guessing, like cybersecurity is probably one of the last concerns on your mind as you're scaling and growing.

24:28So I think this is not the last we're going to hear about this kind of thing, whether it's open AI or other, you know, like really fast, buzzy, growing AI startups. I think the cybersecurity element to something that no one has been talking about? Well, actually, one of the things that people have talked about with cybersecurity is that cybersecurity companies are going to really become way more valuable in the age of Gen AI. I think probably for two reasons. One is companies are going to want to protect their models like OpenAI, and also it's going to make it much easier to, for instance, fish people when you have a Gen AI tool that's able to comb the internet about them or read documents and then write something extremely personal but it is interesting like i do think that like right now we're not at a place where like if they let's say china got the gpt-4 weights it's not like a national security problem like if they're able to get that model it's not like the u.s has to like you know go to war with china or anything like that but you do start to see and also we should note that there was no customer data or partner data that was exposed but you do start to see the concerns of like some of the open ai employees that have spoken out where it's basically just like if you're not dead set on security and you develop something like this, like let's say you develop artificial general intelligence and you're susceptible to a hack of any kind, like you're going to be in possession of the number one target for hackers, period, if you develop AGI.

25:53Security has to be like basically top priority along with the actual research of how to push this technology forward. Yeah, I think on the safety topic, it is. It's the more powerful and dangerous whatever your building is. Obviously, it's going to become more interesting, almost like a James Bond movie, a target for nefarious hackers all over the world. So I think it is important. But the more – like how are these companies building out their kind of defense functions in this way? And are they? We don't know. I think that's something that people need to look into. Because if you think about it, like an open AI kind of is the poster child that the core product and products have rolled out incredibly, have launched amazing products, done them very fast.

26:44But then certainly on the corporate governance side, like are they – if they're ever going to IPO, are their financials like public company ready? I would bet not. But like – I mean have they built out their accounting function carefully? Complex accounting is basically just like OpenAI sells and pays for expenses with Microsoft money. Yeah. I mean, actually, they do have complex accounting. But I think like all those kind of secondary support functions that are just part of usually like a midsize company, certainly a company with billions of dollars in revenue and tens of billions in valuation should have those kind of functions that are already mature.

27:23but I'm guessing that that's not been a focus of them or probably most other of these AI startups. And I think at some point, we will start to see some fallout on this. Yeah, and by the way, just to close the loop on a discussion we've been having on the podcast for the past couple months, we've been talking about like, if the OpenAI employees saw something, they should come out and say something. And we had William Saunders on the show on Wednesday, this ex-OpenAI super alignment team member who basically said like, there's nothing immediately concerning or immediately dangerous to like society or humanity or no like technological development in particular that's you know scaring the daylights out of these super alignment researchers so we got that out of the way but this type of stuff is the thing that do that does worry them along with like not having enough i think not having enough resources to run the research that they would need to make sure that the development of these models are safe you know It's good to get to the bottom of what they're actually asking for, and this is actually something that we think a little bit more about.

28:26It makes sense. The thing that they're asking for does make sense. The New York City subway system slogan is going to save us from AGI and the robot takeover of if you see something, say something. Exactly. That's all we're asking. Anyone out there. I thought about that. Yeah. I thought about that actually as we're talking. It's a freaking good slogan. Yeah. That's one thing you can say about New York City government. They brand very well. One more thing I want to talk about, about this article that annoyed me. It's not really that bad, but it's sort of typical. So the Times obviously, like, listened to Leopold Archenbrenner's interview with Dwarakish Patel, friend of the show, who's been on before.

29:10And they cite it as, Archenbrenner alluded to the breach on a recent podcast, but details of the incident have not been previously reported. Okay, so clearly they follow the scent that Ashton Brenner left on the Dwarkesh show. And they also grab a picture of Ashton Brenner on the Dwarkesh podcast, but they cannot bring themselves to cite the Dwarkesh podcast, even though the information from the show seemingly sent them down this trail. And that pisses me off. I mean, if you have somebody whose information you're relying on, you're taking a screenshot from their YouTube and putting it in your story.

29:51I can't understand the arrogance of not including the name of the podcaster in the story. It drives me nuts. What are they not? This is better reporting than you did until Dworkish came along and unearthed this. not the first not the first independent media uh professional to have that complaint i think yeah i mean they i mean it's similar that they would do it to us when we were in um at buzzfeed oh buzzfeed news i mean i think that was a poster child for that right well just like the big cut it just doesn't it doesn't make any sense to me like i've had scoops before also. Actually, the Times has been good at crediting my scoops, but others have not.

30:36And I just feel like there's this sort of sense of superiority that drives me freaking nuts when it comes to this. All right. So we should also talk about in terms of like giving credit very quickly. Did you see this thing that happened with Figma over the past week where Figma effectively released this tool where you can design stuff based off of a prompt? and it ended up basically emulating the Apple weather app when you asked it to build a simple weather app. Have you seen this story? Yes. So Figma, again, like a prototyping user interface, user experience design tool, now, like many others, has the generative AI component.